Pery Broad joined the SS in 1941, aged 20, and came to Auschwitz the following year. Here, he soon began work in the Political Department, which was closely involved in executions and gassings. After the war, he wrote a frank account of mass extermination in Auschwitz. In 1965, Broad was sentenced by a West German court to four years’ imprisonment. In 1979, he was interviewed by the French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, who secretly recorded their conversation for the ground-breaking documentary Shoah (1985). In this extract, Broad claims (wrongly) that there was no resistance at the “death factory” and that working in Auschwitz had greatly affected him. Broad died in 1994.
Source: Created by Claude Lanzmann during the filming of Shoah, used by permission of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem